After meeting at the Tiki Jam and receiving a "lesson" from GMAN, Helz asked about trying to do one of his pieces in stoneware. It didn't take G long to turn out the "Biter" and send him my way.

I tried to do this without damaging the original. I made a model of the bone carving after pulling a relief mold from it. I then poured a plaster model and made a one piece mold. The clean up from the one piece mold was a nightmare.

I have now done a new two piece mold to reduce the clean up time and improve the quality of the finished pieces. Here's some pics of this new adventure.

This is the original piece and the relief pulled from it.

These are the first attempts. As you can see by the one on the right there was a lot of material to remove after the fact. It took a long time to clean up and the mortality rate was very high.

I think we have the feel of the piece, and you can see some of the shrink that happens.

I'm trying to do them justice.

The one on the left looks blue but it is actually green. These are the first of our tests. After changing the mold we have a less time consuming process. I have pics of the new changes and I'll put them up later.

Just to clarify...I have credit for NONE of the craftsmanship on this. I just talked G into letting us borrow the Biter for a bit to see if we could do something collaboritave. Artists working together, coming up with new stuff, that was my goal...I just brokered the deal.

As far as getting one...we're planning on doing a run of a few in the brown in the semi-near future (might be a few special ones too - we'll see), but we'll post the details about that in the Marketplace. I want to keep this all about the work.

On 2007-03-18 18:55, poptiki wrote: The clean up from the one piece mold was a nightmare.

[ This Message was edited by: poptiki 2007-03-18 19:36 ]

I'm hearing you there! I gotta stop being lazy with my moldmaking.
These look really good, it's surprising no-one's tried it before really. Larger ceramic tikis(for the wall)are all the rage over here.
How big are the original and the copies?
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And just think, the amount of clay used is probably only a couple of pennies worth of material. I'd probably be interested. The ceramic tikis charms at this piont are more rare then bone or jade, (there is just less of them around) That will probably change in a month or two.
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